From left, Michelle Warkintin as Margaret, Heather Franklin as Janet, Angela Wilkie as Catherine, Meaghan Sholdice as Eve, and Zoe Cobb as Marta, perform a scene from a 2005 remount of the play Waiting for the Parade written by Calgary playwright John Murrell in 1976. Taking place between 1939 and VE-Day, the play tells the story of five Calgary women who were married to men fighting in the Second World War against Nazi Germany.Tim Fraser
/ Calgary Herald

Who knew that the Canadian playwright of the summer of 2013 would be John Murrell, who was also the Canadian playwright of 1977 and 1978?

Yet there he was, opening Taking Shakespeare, his 2012 High Performance Rodeo hit, at the Stratford Festival earlier this week.

That follows Peace in Our Time, Murrell’s reworking of George Bernard Shaw’s Geneva, which opened at the Shaw Festival in June.

And that’s not all: Still to come is a new play, Climbing Down, featuring Toronto actress Daniela Vlaskalic and Tony Award winner Brian Dennehy.

And just recently, Murrell was short-listed for a Governor General’s Award for translating the work of playwright Carole Frechette, whose drama Thinking of Yu premièred at the Enbridge playRites Festival of New Canadian Plays in 2012 and has gone on to enjoy subsequent productions in Quebec, France and Germany.

Not bad for a guy in his 70s, who gave up playwriting for a dozen years to focus on writing opera librettos.

Not that any of the national and international acclaim is new. Murrell’s Memoir (1978) was produced by Stratford almost a quarter century ago (in 1990), one of many high-profile productions it received around the world, as was Waiting for the Parade (1977), his breaththrough play.

Long before Calgary became Canada’s 2012 cultural capital, Murrell and fellow Calgary playwright and compadre Sharon Pollock were laying the foundation for this city’s emergence as one of the most dynamic theatre towns anywhere.

“You’ve heard all the jokes and disparaging remarks about culture in Calgary and lack thereof,” says former Herald drama critic Brian Brennan, who reviewed many of Murrell’s early plays in the 1970s and ’80s, “but the fact is, we had some of the best around.

“I just look at John and Sharon as two examples,” he says, “who didn’t feel the need to be in Toronto or Vancouver or anywhere else to establish themselves.

“They did it right here in Calgary, and their work was noticed and it travelled,” he says. “(And) it wasn’t just produced across Canada, but produced in the (United) States, in England, their work was translated and produced in Europe.”

What makes a new Murrell drama showing up at Stratford in 2013 so surprising for Brennan is that Murrell — who is feeling unwell and wasn’t able to comment for this article — long ago felt he’d run out of reasons to write plays.

“By the time he had written October, which was in the ’80s,” Brennan says, “he kind of figured that would be it as far as playwriting was concerned. He was interested in writing opera librettos, which he did, and translations, and didn’t really think he had another play to write — that anything he wrote would just be a repetition of what he’d done before.”

Taking Shakespeare, which tells the story of a young university student named Murph and his relationship with his Shakespeare prof, was one of those hastily written scripts, Murrell told the Herald’s Bob Clark in 2012.

He wrote the earliest draft in October 2010, following the Vancouver Opera première of Lillian Alling, for which Murrell wrote the libretto — one of four (including the Calgary Opera’s Filumena, Frobisher and The Inventor) he wrote since giving up playwriting around the turn of the 21st century.

“I think I needed to do something that wasn’t opera,” Murrell said, adding that he “just sat down and wrote a preliminary version of this (Taking Shakespeare) in three or four days.”

An impromptu 2011 Banff Centre reading caught the attention of One Yellow Rabbit’s Blake Brooker and Denise Clarke, and the play ended up on the schedule for the 2012 High Performance Rodeo, with Clarke slated to play the prof, the same role Martha Henry is playing at Stratford.

That’s not how Clarke, a close friend of Murrell’s who had previously worked with him in Theatre Calgary’s production of Memoir, saw it, however.

“He wanted me to play the prof and I said, I’d love to,” Clarke says. “It’s a killer role, but all I can hear is you.”

“You should play the prof and I’ll play Murph.”

That led to the unlikely — and dynamic — experience of Murrell being back onstage (he started out as an actor in the 1960s), playing against Clarke, as an inarticulate 23-year-old guy.

And as unlikely as discovering a John Murrell drama at the High Performance Rodeo may have seemed, it was a reunion of sorts: before he’d quit playwriting to write librettos, Murrell wrote Death in New Orleans, which the Rabbits performed, to great acclaim, at the 1998 Edinburgh Fringe.

Clarke, who spent last August with Murrell playing around with the idea of creating a new show about dance legend Martha Graham, doesn’t deny that the two of them make an odd artistic couple.

“You couldn’t get any odder,” she says. “It makes no sense whatsoever, but we’re entirely inspired by one another, and I think take tremendous strength and solace in our friendship and esthetic relationship because he’s much more than an artist.

“He’s a very forward thinker and he’s very, very playful, and so ... yeah, the friendship is really intense, and I think it’s always meant a lot to him to know that we speak the same language, even though we like different kinds of art.”

That playfulness has been evident for Vlaskalic ever since she co-ordinated (at the suggestion of former Calgarian and Theatre DVxT artistic director Vikki Anderston) a 2010 meeting at a Toronto airport bar between Dennehy and Murrell, to talk about Murrell creating a new play for herself and Dennehy.

“Brian was flying out of Toronto and John was flying in,” she says, “and we met there, and Brian and I just talked about what we thought the play should be about, and some of the things he had been interested in, and one of the things he and I had talked about was sort of the Canadian-American relationship.”

A year later, in 2011, there was a workshop of Climbing Down, which tells the story of a single harrowing night at McMaster University in Hamilton, when a famous, fading Irish-American novelist (Dennehy) comes to town and ends up setting back Canada-U.S. relations a little bit with some harrowing verbal attacks aimed at an academic played by Vlaskalic and her young assistant.

That workshop was followed by another in 2012, at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and next week, the trio are convening again at Stratford, with the hopes of nailing down the latest instalment in the never-ending career of John Murrell.

“If you’re going to have a Canadian writer write for Brian Dennehy,” Vlaskalic says, “I think John Murrell’s our man. They have great chemistry.”

For Brennan — who panned Murrell’s early stuff, but later became social companions of both Murrell and Pollock — the news that Murrell is still making news in 2013 is inspiring.

“It’s great to see him come along in — shall we say — his winter years,” Brennan says “and producing new work again, and having it on the stage at Stratford. That’s terrific!

“It’s a great boost to all the geezers like myself,” Brennan says, “to realize that when you reach a certain age, you still have a contribution to make.”

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Calgary playwright John Murrell is once again the toast of Stratford and Shaw

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